


New Girl

by tornyourdress



Category: Ally McBeal (TV)
Genre: Ally Is such a romantic, F/M, Teen Angst, Teenagers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-30
Updated: 2020-05-30
Packaged: 2021-03-03 01:21:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 674
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24456628
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tornyourdress/pseuds/tornyourdress
Summary: Ally and Billy as teenagers.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 2





	New Girl

**Author's Note:**

> 2007 / written for (challenge: 'Cruel Summer')

The summer Ally is thirteen, there’s a new girl in the neighbourhood. Jessica has blonde hair – real blonde, not like Ally’s brownish-blonde, down-to-her-shoulders boring hair, real blonde like a golden fairy princess, like a unicorn in human form, maybe, except Ally doesn’t want to touch this creature. She doesn’t want to go anywhere near her. 

But Billy does. 

Billy has been her best friend – well, one of her best friends _really_ , because there are some things you can’t talk to boys about – for five years now. It’s practically a lifetime, even if he doesn’t know things like how she has four bras hidden away in her bottom drawer even though she doesn’t need them, or how she still cries every time she gets her period because it means she’s growing up and even though she wants to have breasts she doesn’t want to be a _grown-up_ , or how she can stare in the mirror and find so many things wrong with her face that it feels like she must be the ugliest thirteen-year-old in the world. 

And Jessica is the most beautiful, and Billy wants to be her friend, and when Ally doesn’t, he makes friends with her anyway, and he says he’s just being _nice_. Ally wants to believe this. Billy is the nicest boy she knows. Last summer, Billy kissed her, and she thought it meant that they were going to be together forever, but she is thirteen now, and her other friends, the girls who understand the way boys’ minds work, tell her that a kiss is just a kiss.

Ally doesn’t want to believe that a kiss is just a kiss. A kiss matters. She doesn’t just kiss anybody. She has only ever kissed Billy, who is the only person who knows she wants to be an artist when she grows up. Her dad would smile at her and tell her he would support her, but that he would worry about her, because artists don’t make much of a living, and he only wants what’s best for her. Her mom would just nod like it didn’t mean anything. But Billy knows. He knows that much about her. Maybe it’s not everything but it’s something. And he kissed her. 

All her friends are away in exciting places or in summer camp or something, and Ally spends her days practicing on the piano or painting or closing her eyes and dreaming. She dreams that Billy will come back to her, that he really is just being nice to Jessica the blonde fairy princess.

She stops by his house one day because they’re supposed to go on a bike ride. Billy’s mom is packing up a picnic basket for them, because she’s nice like that, and she tells Ally to go on through to the back, where ‘they’ are, and Ally freezes because when Billy called she thought it meant it was just the two of them today. 

She turns and runs away and there is a part of her that hopes Billy will come and get her and tell her it’s all a mistake and he wants to be her friend and not Jessica’s. But he doesn’t, not until two days later, when he knocks on her door and tells her that he and Jessica are _going out_. 

Ally wants to know what that means. Did you kiss her, she asks, and regrets it instantly. He says yes. 

The summer Ally is fourteen, Jessica moves away and Billy comes by like nothing ever happened. Like he never kissed anyone else. Like he never _went out_ with another girl. 

Her friends say that she shouldn’t take him back. She’s not, she says, they’re just friends. She can’t just not be friends with Billy. It’s Billy.

He tells her she’s beautiful and she thinks she loves him. True love, real love, a kiss-means-something love. Ally and Billy, together forever. 

The next time he kisses her, she believes it all over again. Unicorns, after all, do not exist. But love does.

Love. Does. She believes.


End file.
